Le café de nuit (The Night Café)

Vincent van Gogh

Oil on canvas

Yale University Art Gallery

Painted in September 1888 in Arles, France, Le café de nuit (The Night Café) depicts the interior of the Café de la Gare on the Place Lamartine, an all-night establishment where van Gogh himself lodged. The composition shows five patrons seated along blood-red walls, a green billiard table dominating the center, and four gas lamps casting halos of orange and yellow light, all rendered with van Gogh's characteristically thick, impastoed brushwork. Rather than a neutral record of a public space, the painting is a deliberate emotional statement: van Gogh employed clashing complementary reds and greens—what he called "suggestive" or "arbitrary" colour—to convey, as he wrote to his brother Theo, "the terrible passions of humanity." Widely regarded as one of van Gogh's masterpieces and a landmark of Post-Impressionism, the work anticipates the Expressionist movement through its radical use of color to externalize psychological states rather than describe visual reality.